Product Description

Set in a small, remote community in rural Tennessee in the years between the two world wars, The Orchard Keeper is an early classic from one of America’s finest and most celebrated authors. It tells of John Wesley Rattner, a young boy, and Marion Sylder, an outlaw and bootlegger who, unbeknownst to either of them, has killed the boy’s father. Cormac McCarthy's debut novel is a magnificent evocation of an American landscape, and of a lost American time.

‘The feeling for the land and seasons is so intense as to be part of the story and there are scenes one will never forget . . . A complicated and evocative exposition of the transience of life’ Harper’s

‘A true American original’ Newsweek

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5002 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

About the Author

Cormac McCarthy is the author of ten acclaimed novels, most recently The Road. Among his honours are the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Customer Reviews

Excellent first novel
McCarthy's first novel addresses themes returned to in later works. Man's relation to nature is a key theme in this work, in which hunting (of animals and of men) is a recurring image, as is the weather. There is also a constant struggle between choice and chance in shaping the lives of the characters in this novel.

The dialogue, humour, beauty, and brutality usually displayed in McCarthy's work is evident here. Not as dense or horrific as something like Blood Meridian but not the best McCarthy novel to start with either, I'd suggest All the Pretty Horses or No Country for Old Men.